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Going in to this experiment we assumed that all cells in living organisms were more or less the same size, and that it was the number of cells that corresponded to the size of the organism (large organism = more cells).

We first looked at a cross section of a worm, and second, part of a human's uterine lining. According to our initial thought/ our pre-experiment hypothesis, the worm and the uterus lining should have had cells the same size. When we looked at the worm cross section, we could see its complete boundary and the boundaries of its internal parts/organs. It was very difficult to see anything that looked like cells, though we knew we had to be looking at cells because living things are made of cells. On the 40 lens, we could make out many tiny brown-orange dots... but we still weren't sure. Then, we moved on to the uterine lining to compare. We immediately saw cells, or at least their nuclei through the 4x lens. As we zoomed in, we were able to see boundaries of cells-- the nuclei were dark purple and oblong/circular, and the cell membrane was a more elongated, transparent form surrounding it. We looked next at a part of a pig's kidney and found similar observations and cells of similar size to those of the uterine wall.

This changed our hypothesis. We now thought perhaps the cell sizes were different, but proportionally sized to the size of the entire organism/or proportional to its parts (i.e., looking at the full worm made it difficult to see the cells (assuming they were smaller) because its organs were smaller than, say, a human's or a pig's...).

To test this revised hypothesis, we compared a small plant (moss) to a larger plant (a pine tree).

We observed results that matched our hypothesis. The pine tree stem cross section, at 10xlens, we could measure/see about one nucleus per square "unit" (the space between the line for 0 and the line for 1) in the pine stem, but we could measure up to five nuclei in this same space for the moss.

As a side note, it was also slightly easier to see cells in plants because of their cell walls.